Saturday, September 22, 2012

the time

Mrs
Blake is lying where her sister found her, face down on the carpet, one arm
crooked through the legs of a nest of mahogany tables, a scattering of custard
creams and an upended Tupperware container lying on its side just away from her
other, outstretched hand. I struggle to disentangle her whilst Rae moves some
furniture to make room enough to drag her out. Once Mrs Blake is on her back, I
start chest compressions whilst Rae works around me, cutting through her clothes
and sticking the defib pads on.

A
second crew arrives to help.

We
work through our protocols.

After
every aspect has been played out – almost an hour in this case - we review the
facts, and decide to stop.

‘What
time have you got?’ says Rae.

‘Eleven
o’clock.’

Suddenly
there’s a frantic whirring and popping noise from behind us up on the wall – a cuckoo
clock. A little door just below the roof of it swings aside, and a crazy-looking
wooden bird crashes out. It hoo-hoos the hour, jerking its body up and down, flapping
its wings in time to the striking of a bell inside. The moment eleven has been
counted, the bird disappears back inside - and the little door slams shut.

8 comments:

I couldn't help thinking about the thousands of times the clock had sounded in the past, and the significance of this particular episode. Morbid, I know. Just one of those things. I suppose the truth is, we're surrounded by an infinite number of coincidental details like this - details which in themselves are quite meaningless, but now and again seem to be something else. :/

Hi LyndaYou know - I think cuckoo clocks are cute and I'm full of admiration for the mechanics of it all, but I'm not sure that if I had one I wouldn't have completely lost my mind by the end of the week. :/

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.

Talking about Orson Welles - I knew he was a precocious actor/director, but I didn't know to what extent. Apparently he was only 6 months old when he played Harry Lime. They had to pad his trench coat with newspaper and put inserts in his shoes, but still, quite impressive. They also had to edit his cuckoo clock speech quite heavily - he kept crying because the hat was itchy. And to think he ended up advertising sherry. Damn you, world!